The Holy wars of Cyberspace.

[SpookyZalost]

For as long as there have been differing groups among computer enthusiasts there have been debates and disagreements as to which method is superior.  As with all things humans tend to do  however surprisingly there have been a number of so called "Holy Wars" In computer history.

the ones i know about are.
The Tcl War (another product of GNU forcing open systems over existing ones.)
The TCP/IP Wars (networking protocols.)
The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate (Linux vs Minix)
The UNIX Wars (this was one of the big ones.  Linux was a late comer and answer to this.)
The Format Wars (various competing formats, ascii vs EBCDIC character encoding for example.)
The Editor Wars (emacs vs. vi, this one just sorta went cold.)
Bracing and Indentation Style (One True Brace style, Allman style, etc)
Symbolics vs. LMI. (Hardware Lips machines used in A.i. research during the Regan Era.)
East const vs. West const (C++ standards int const vs const int.)
Brain Wars (Neats vs Scruffies in Artificial Intelligence)
Berkeley UNIX vs. System V (was part of the Unix wars.)
Init Daemon Wars (unix/linux initialization daemons.  how your OS boots.)

I'll be making posts going over some of these in this thread but it's some interesting stuff given its significance in computer history as far as culture goes and you could consider these more like culture wars but generally the standards we all use today were the results of these cultural conflicts among enthusiasts and users.

Note:  Kyng, I'm not entirely sure if this goes under history or Technology but it's about technology so I'm putting it here.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Unix Wars

How can I best explain this?  I guess I should start with a bit of history.  Before the era of the personal computer there only existed, mainframes which were getting smaller all the time.  this is why PC's were called Micro Computers.  Because they were tiny in comparison.  Anyway at the time there were a few different operating systems, usually each being successive over the previous one.

it started with the guys at MIT and their PDP computers.  The original hackers, Richard Greenblatt, Bill Gosper, and the other OG hackers from the TMRC.  Those guys revolutionized computing but more importantly they defined how computers would be used from the late 1950's onwards.

in those days you had to request physical time slots to use one of the mainframes.  If you were a sibling in the 80's up to the early 2000's you'd get it given computers were family owned rather than personally owned.  This was something the IBM guys guarded Zealously making it difficult to experiment with the big IBM mainframe at MIT.  However nobody was using the DEC PDP 1 and later the DEC PDP6.  So they began tinkering and experimenting.  This is how the original hackers got started going from DIY model train set control systems to the first custom Hardware and software which would turn into Graphical Displays, Modems, and all the other niceties we've come to expect.

from ITS came CTSS, the first multi-user operating system which allowed people to use terminals to share computing resources.  Then Multix in 1969 maintained by Honeywell, and eventually Unix in 1971 by Bell Laboratories as a competitor to Multix.  (yes Ma Bell, now AT&T, or at least what remains of Bell.)

and for about a decade Bell maintained Unix. known as Research Unix with version 1, then 2.  finally with version 3 it went commercial.  Then something happened.  People started creating their own variations of it.  you had System III by AT&T (formerly Bell), Xenix by Microsoft (yes that microsoft), you had BSD developed by UC Berkly, Minix, GNU Unix, the list goes on.  By the mid 1980's there were over half a dozen of them.  Of those the big three were AT&T System III, BSD, and AT&T System V which was trying to supplant the others and enforce a new standard.  

By the mid to late 1980's System V had largely overtaken System III and BSD was it's major competitor.  Xenix had died off as microsoft began to focus on windows (1.0, 2.0 and later 3.0).  And primarily you either forked System V or BSD with BSD being the easier of the two.  Sun microsystems would create Sun OS from BSD for example.

The Unix wars was about standards in the Unix operating system and an attempt to unify it without it being completely controlled by Bell Labs as BSD continued to stand against System V.  Two monstrous Titans duking it out.  Research/education institutions vs Corporations.  BSD had TCP/IP built in but System V did not at that time for example.  the way C was handled given it was being developed by AT&T and not BSD.  (C being developed by Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix and employee of Bell Labs.  C being the successor to the B programming language.)

During all this Upheaval there was a growing movement among Unix users and Vendors.  To make the standards Open.  In 1984 the X/Open standards group was formed.  In response to this, in 1987 Sun, then the lead vendor of BSD and AT&T (formerly Bell) teamed up to attempt to unify the Unix system into a single standard.  The press applauded this but in 1988 out of fears over one group having absolute control several other Unix licensees formed both the Open software Foundation and Unix International.

The Unix wars soon turned hot as the 80's became the 90's and the various open variations of unix started competing commercially pushing technical issues back as they began fighting over dominance and who could implement the most features. This in turn created a problem where anywhere from a quarter to a full third of operating system utilities being able to be induced into a crash by simply fuzzing them.  (Fuzzing is a technique where you overwhelm a program by throwing invalid or junk data at it.)

During all this in 1988 the POSIX standard tried to standardize the C library beyond the upcoming C standard.  later it expanded to specify other aspects of the OS environment.  in 1993 the Unix International and Open Sofware Foundation groups formed the COSE or Common Open Sofware environment Alliance effectively ending the most significant era of the Unix wars.  In June of that year AT&T sold Unix to Novell.  who in turn transferred it to X/Open in October.

In 1996 X open and the OSF merged to form the Open group with COSE being integrated into that conglomeration.  They created the Single Unix Specification which in turn controls the current POSIX standards.  Since then occasional outbursts of Unix Factionalism has broken out but nothing like the great unix wars.  such as the HP/SCO alliance formed in 1995 and Project Monteray (a team up of IBM CO, Sequent and intel.) formed in 1998, breaking down into litigation in the SCO V IBM case with the new SCO (formerly Caldera.)

During all this BSD worked to Purge AT&T Copyright code from their version in an effort to distance itself from it's corporate counterpart.  creating 386 BSD which then became Free BSD Net BSD, and Open BSD.  Mac OSX was then based on Open BSD

And in the midst of all that GNU and its efforts with Unix would transition to support Linux creating GNU Linux in an effort to remove itself from copyright issues.  GNU was written from scratch to avoid legal issues and Linux aimed to be mostly POSIX compliant.  I will go into the sub war that came up over Minix vs Linux when I cover the Micro Kernel war.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Emacs vs Vi.

Much like the Unix wars this one is tied deep into the history of early computing.  in the early days of Multix there was a text and file editor known as TECO or Tape Editor & COrrector which was developed, big surprise, at MIT.  At the time Punched Paper Tape was the only storage medium on the PDP 1.  this is before Floppy discs, and harddrives, and magnetic tape, and networks.  the year?  1962.  This was later changed to the Text Editor and COrrector as the PDP-1 Version supported other media by that point.  TECO is important because the original Emacs was based around it making it tied to one of the first ever text editors and Emacs being short for Editor Macros since at the time it was a collection of extensions for the TECO editor.

Meanwhile Unix (Research Unix) being developed by Bell Laboratories had ED which was short for Editor and was one of the first components of the Unix Operating system released in 1969.  Ed was clunky and a bit user unfriendly to use however and so Ex was created which is short for EXtended, this was written in 1976 to deal with the issue of ED being an clunky mess to work in.  Ex would then be extended into the Vi Editor.

Emacs and Vi were both released in 1976 around the same time and sought to solve the same problem.  a reliable and functional programming editor for an operating system and while Vi was commercial Emacs was created by hackers and distributed on the basis of communal sharing.  that is... it was shared under the proto-open-source ideal.  At the time Vi was Unix and Emacs was ITS.  Vi was on every version of Unix just about while Emacs was mainly used by the guys in the A.I. lab at MIT (formerly a group split off from the TMRC.)

Not long after Emacs was ported to the LISP programming language.  and then was ported to Multics.  from there it was ported by Richard Stallman as GNU Emacs in 1984 starting the Emacs/Vi war the following year.  At the heart of the Debate was several things from interface design to price.  With Vi often costing around $2,400 while Emacs was free.  Vi used decision trees while Emacs used key combinations.  Vi used less memory while Emacs had a graphical interface.  and while Emacs had full unicode support Vi did not.

What it really came down to however was that Emacs was more extendible and literally free while Vi was a dedicated Editor and light weight.  Emacs was popular among the LISP crowd while Vi was popular among other groups.  During all this there were third party alternatives as well that popped up including Pico which would evolve into the more well-known Nano.

It got so wild that when Richard Stallman (creator of GNU, and Member of the MIT A.I. Lab.) created the Church of Emacs as a parody.  Vi supporters created an opposing Cult of Vi stating that the church of Emacs is an attempt to "ape their betters."  This turned into the Usenet Newsgroups Alt.Religion.Emacs for fans of the former.  If there ever was an Alt.Religion.Vi I've been unsuccessful in locating it thus far but will update this post if I do.

in the late 1990's it really just came down to these two and as the internet began to hit its stride and the .com bubble burst along with a flood of new users and things went into a sort of cold war state.  newer editors came along.  people began to forget about Vi and Emacs relegating it to only the most die-hard fans of either one many of whom are now aging into obsolescence themselves.  But for a while there in the 80's and 90's it was probably one of the most heated and constant arguments on the early proto-internet.

[SpookyZalost]

The Protocol Wars (TCP/IP vs OSI)

You might see a recurring pattern here.  But the 1980's and 1990's was an age of a lot of conflict in cyberspace.  This one however would see not just engineers and enthusiasts but nations getting involved as the groundwork for what would become the internet was being laid out.  it all started in the 70's as on the early ARPANET there were multiple standards for how to communicate between machines.

First you had Packet Switching vs Circuit Switching.  at the time computers were primarily dumb terminals that accessed mainframes.  as early as 1960 various papers were written on the subject of interlinking several mainframes together.  the first LAN was a datagram service called NPL and the Arpanet was a circuit based switching network.  ARPA being the Advanced Research Projects Agency.  the precursor to DARPA.

Problem was.  telecommunications networks were held up by a handful of monopolies.  the Bell Telephone owned AT&T in the US.  And the General Post office or GPO in the UK which had the PTT or national Postal Telegraph and Telephone service.

At the time there were three major independent teams trying to develop a way of linking computers together.  J.C.R. Licklider at the IPTO of ARPA (Information Processing Techniques Office).  Baran at the RAND corporation.  and Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory or NPL in the UK.

Each tried to convince their local telecom (AT&T or GPO) of the merits of truly electronic communications.  At the time the GPO and AT&T were primarily working in Audio Communications only and focused on Circuit switching.  the alternatives to which were Message Switching or Packet Switching.  Packet switching being a concept introduced by Davies. and Message Switching introduced by the venerable Wesley Clark.  Inventor of the first Modern PC as we'd recognize it.

in 1966 Bob Taylor became director of the IPTO and set out to Achieve Licklider's vision to enable resource sharing between remote computers before Hiring Larry Roberts to manage the program.  Roberts brought in Leonard Kleinrock who wrote a doctoral thesis on applying mathematical methods to Communcations Networks.  in October 1967 at the Symposium on Operating systems Principles.  Roberts presented the first ARPA Net proposal based on a Message Switching network using IMP's or Interface Message Processors.  Dedicated gateways that would make up the first generation of we now call Routers.

Roberts also Incorporated Davie's and Baran's ideas on packet switching into the proposal and the network was built by BBN and designed by Bob Kahn.  It departed from NPL's connectionless network model to avoid congestion and offered a service that was connection oriented.  it also enforced both flow and error control but was limited that only one message may be in transit in the network and each message would be sent in sequential order to avoid conflict.  This design would become known as the Virtual Circuit Network.

Not long after Virtual Circuit network design would be replaced by Datagram based designs which allowed the sending of information between two systems independently of the others.  this would then lead to the 1822 protocol written by Bob Khan in 1969.  Steven Crocker formed the Network Working group or NWG that year and they would design the Network Control Program (NCP) which tried to create separate Protocols.  (a protocol being a specific method of communication.)  Leading to the creation of Telnet, and FTP for linking and sending information and files across the early ARPANet.

by 1970 the ARPANET Network interface was codified by the NCP and deployed by the NWG.  beginning the deployment and allowing it to begin growing and expanding.  Also around this time the first multiplayer game was tried by some MIT guys.  Spacewar! (a game inspired by the Lensman series and the first true computer game) was played on the early ARPANET as a demonstration using two terminals in remote locations accessing a mainframe thus making it the first example of an online Multiplayer Game.

Meanwhile in the UK went from the NPL to the BPO-T (telecommunications division) in 1969 there.  they developed their own packet switching network called the EPSS (Experimental Packet Switching System).  The protocols however were limited and often described as Esoteric.

Remi Despres started work in 1971 at the CNET research center as part of the French PTT to create their own Packet switching network based around the concept of EPSS called RCP.  Then in 1972 Davies conceived and described Datagram networks, did simulation work on them.  and built local lines to link them together.  Louis Pouzin would then study his work and simplify it into the CYCLADES project  creating  something that would later be called Internetworking (an early internet concept) while working with the PTT.  His concept was called Catenate for concatenated Network.  Pouzin and his students and colleagues would end up advising BBN as consultants before going on to form the International Network Working Group catching the attention of ARPA researchers the INWG was working on a large scale network which would eventually become known as a WAN.

and so it would go that on both sides of the Atlantic both the ARPA and INWG guys would work independent of one another but inspired by each other to create a large distributed communications network. until it came time to link the two together.  The two competing standards were Completely Incompatible!  this would lead to the first gateway that would take packets from the ARPA side and translate them into something the INWG guys system could understand and vice versa.

Throughout the 1970's more and more Network concepts would pop up as there was no real standard yet.  by 1977 there were dozens and the first TCP or Transmission Control Program was created with circuit switching having largely been replaced by datagrams by that point.  in 1978 TCP was a reliable connection protocol, IP was a connectionless layer.  and for services that didn't need those UDP or Universal Datagram Protocol was the thing.

TCP merged with IP creating TCP/IP and the first internet was born as an extension of the ARPANET.  As the 1970's rolled into the 1980's new protocols for different services began popping up.  TCP/IP, UDP were low level protocols and various companies built on top of that.  things like PUP, DECnet, BNA, MAN/TOP (pushed by GM and Boeing.)  and Ethernet which was promoted by DEC, Intel, and Xerox to out compete MAN/TOP.

the NSF, NASA, US DoE and various other research institutions built networks based around the DoD network model of protocols DECnet and IP over X.25 while in the UK the OSI model was being introduced. and so there was a major upheaval as the DoD model based around various proprietary protocols and the OSI model which was based around open protocols once again caused both sides of the Atlantic to go head to head as things began to heat up and a new system was being advocated for to replace the old ARPANET in the late 1980's early 1990's.

people advocated for different sides where some saw TCP/IP as the way and OSI as overly bureaucratic and out of touch with existing networks.  while others advocated for OSI as superior to the existing TCP/IP and X.25 systems.

This would alienate the early Internet communicate and lead to a dispute after the IAB (internet Architecture Board.)  Proposed replacing IP with CLNP, the OSi Connectionless Network Protocol.  In response Vint Cerf of Stanford and chairman of the INWG walked into the 1992 Internet Engineering Task Force meeting and performing a strip tease in a 3 piece suit and revealing a T shirt that said IP on Everything.  His intention was to reiterate that a goal of the IAB was to run IP on every underlying transmission medium.  David Clark of the IETF in response quoted the following. "We Reject: Kings, Presidents, and Voting. We believe in: Rough Consensus and Running Code."  the Internet Society or ISOC was chartered that year.

Francois Fluckiger wrote that "Firms that win the internet market, like Cisco, are small.  Simply, they possess the internet culture and are interested in it, and notably, participate in IETF."

Furthermore, the Internet Community was opposed to a homogeneous approach to networking, such as the one based on a single standard like SNA.  they wanted a Pluralistic model of networking where many different architectures could join into a network of networks.

This would eventually culminate in the 7 layers of the OSI model we know today.  which at the time was more layers than the network engineering community had anticipated.  Many thought that was too many compared to the two of TCP/IP.  eventually things would settle down and a standard would be put in place but this was one of the really heated conflicts and would culminate in the establishment of the internet we know today with IPV4 and later IPV6 being the protocols of low level communication and the OSI model handling higher level standards by using dedicated ports.

There's still sparks of conflict however as a new conflict may be on the horizon.  the idea that the OSI model no longer fits today's model of computing is gaining ground and a major change may once again sweep across Cyberspace as OSI versus some yet unknown standard are brought to the forefront in an effort to simplify things once again.  X.25 and SNA has been all but forgotten and remain niche at best.

[Kyng]

Great thread . Sorry it took me so long to reply to it... I read the first post almost a month ago, but didn't get around to the second one until today!

I do agree that you put it in the correct place, though: all of this would be of interest to tech enthusiasts, but not to history enthusiasts (unless they were also tech enthusiasts ). In general, I'd put threads about the history of a specific subject into the forum about that subject (rather than the History forum).

Of course, all of these conflicts took place before I was old enough to start using computers (or, in many cases, before I was even born ), but it is interesting to read about this - and think how different the tech world might be today if the 'losing' side had won some of these battles!

[SpookyZalost]

Great thread . Sorry it took me so long to reply to it... I read the first post almost a month ago, but didn't get around to the second one until today!

I do agree that you put it in the correct place, though: all of this would be of interest to tech enthusiasts, but not to history enthusiasts (unless they were also tech enthusiasts ). In general, I'd put threads about the history of a specific subject into the forum about that subject (rather than the History forum).

Of course, all of these conflicts took place before I was old enough to start using computers (or, in many cases, before I was even born ), but it is interesting to read about this - and think how different the tech world might be today if the 'losing' side had won some of these battles!

The funny thing is... some of these conflicts still go on occasionally even though they've become redundant.  

[Kyng]

Great thread . Sorry it took me so long to reply to it... I read the first post almost a month ago, but didn't get around to the second one until today!

I do agree that you put it in the correct place, though: all of this would be of interest to tech enthusiasts, but not to history enthusiasts (unless they were also tech enthusiasts ). In general, I'd put threads about the history of a specific subject into the forum about that subject (rather than the History forum).

Of course, all of these conflicts took place before I was old enough to start using computers (or, in many cases, before I was even born ), but it is interesting to read about this - and think how different the tech world might be today if the 'losing' side had won some of these battles!

The funny thing is... some of these conflicts still go on occasionally even though they've become redundant.  

Doesn't surprise me too much - especially if we're still lumbered with problems as a results of the outcomes of any of these conflicts !

[SpookyZalost]

Great thread . Sorry it took me so long to reply to it... I read the first post almost a month ago, but didn't get around to the second one until today!

I do agree that you put it in the correct place, though: all of this would be of interest to tech enthusiasts, but not to history enthusiasts (unless they were also tech enthusiasts ). In general, I'd put threads about the history of a specific subject into the forum about that subject (rather than the History forum).

Of course, all of these conflicts took place before I was old enough to start using computers (or, in many cases, before I was even born ), but it is interesting to read about this - and think how different the tech world might be today if the 'losing' side had won some of these battles!

The funny thing is... some of these conflicts still go on occasionally even though they've become redundant.  

Doesn't surprise me too much - especially if we're still lumbered with problems as a results of the outcomes of any of these conflicts !

Go into any programming forum and mention either Vi or Emacs... it can often start a flame war pretty fast.

Heck it's still something my programming friends joke about.  One writes games and prefers C++.  the other writes web applications and prefers Javascript and the like.

I'll often chime in with. "As great as that is?  You want something done fast?  Assembly!"